There is an increasing interest in performing assembly of microsystems (i.e. non-destructive transportation, precise manipulation, and exact positioning of microcomponents) by flexible microrobots. A microrobot-based microassembly desktop station is being developed at the University of Karlsruhe. Several prototypes of piezoelectric driven microrobots and a design of the flexible microassembly desktop station were already presented at the last years' SPIE-meetings. In this paper, some implementation results of the station's planning and control system are presented. On the planning level, a common microassembly model for a computer-aidd assembly planning is suggested -which is based on geometric reasoning -and its components are discussed in detail. The feasibility criteria for the generation of feasible assembly sequences and the optimization criteria for selecting the optimal assembly plan are described. For stations employing several microrobots, a method for decomposition of an assembly plan is suggested. Since the station's microrobots are rather complicated systems, it is very hard to find a useful robot model for the control purposes. For this reason, control methods have to be used for positioning of a microrobot, which do not require an exact system model and which allow a reasonable compromise between the real-time processing and the exactness. An intelligent neural controller for positioning a microrobot has been developed.

The design of a microassembly desktop station is a major challenge for microsystem technology. This paper presents several piezoelectric micromanipulation robots, which have been developed to be used in a microassembly station. These robots are of different design and use different actuation principles so that each robot serves for a specific task. They are capable of travelling over long distances and of manipulating in the range of a few nanometers. Several robots of this kind can be accomodated in a microassembly station and can cooperate and perform microassembly tasks as a team. They can also be used for other operations such as online testing of microelectronic chips or manipulating biological cells.

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